A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law went down on Sunday, halting online enrollment for all 50 states in the latest problem to hit the program’s troubled rollout.

The data center operated by Verizon’s Terremark experienced a connectivity issue that caused it to shut down, affecting the federal government’s already problem-plagued online marketplace Healthcare.gov and similar sites operated by 14 states and the District of Columbia, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Obama administration and company officials could not say how long it would take to fix the connectivity problem.

On one hand, websites do go down from time to time. On the other, most mission-critical commercial portals like Amazon have enough redundancy to work around those kinds of issues and keep the sites afloat — and Americans don’t have an “Amazon mandate,” either.

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A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law went down on Sunday, halting online enrollment for all 50 states in the latest problem to hit the program’s troubled rollout.

Wait. Didn’t we just hear from Her Majesty Secretary Sebelius that the data hubs were in great shape? Super-duper speedy and all that?

Be real. They took her down because she didn’t represent an inclusive culture or properly reflect the diversity of the collective. Probably heavily petitioned from university barnacles whose job it is to assign guilt to Americans generally, grant or no grant.

Dems, you passed it with the majority you had at the time with no GOP input. You own it, so take a big swallow and admit the GOP was right in trying to delay not voting for this POS and trying to squash it like a bug.

A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law went down on Sunday, halting online enrollment for all 50 states in the latest problem to hit the program’s troubled rollout.

Gee… while we have this data center “glitch” – let’s use this “unexpected” down time to make more changes to the site. After all – it wasn’t the crappy site that forced the shutdown this time – it was Verizon’s crappy data center.

On the coveredcalifornia site they are constantly changing the graphics and design. It’s already difficult to navigate through and they make it even more difficult for the people who return to it (just about everyone) and they find it changed and not for the better.

Be real. They took her down because she didn’t represent an inclusive culture or properly reflect the diversity of the collective.

winoceros on October 28, 2013 at 10:24 AM

Actually, because she’s female and young (and doesn’t look like a redneck-ette), she probably has enough diversity points in her favor, even though she’s white.

Besides, “Obamacare Annie” (this was the name someone was using for her on another site)looks like she fits the target demographic that the Administration really, really needs to sign up in droves in order to make this risky scheme of a craptacular government program work and maintain viability moving forward. Democrats put diversity front and center always, unless they are truly concerned with success and badly need something to work. Then diversity concerns go out the window -especially if they’re desperate.

I was wondering when her mug would be removed. Who the hell would want to be the face of that disaster?

Doughboy on October 28, 2013 at 11:09 AM

Wouldn’t it be awesome if they used a stock photo and this woman is a staunch conservative and threatened to become the face of “obamacare repeal” if they didn’t stop using her face?

cptacek on October 28, 2013 at 11:54 AM

That we’re a month into this trainwreck and the mighty collective power of the Internet hasn’t discovered who she is convinces me that she’s a random stock photo model, probably from Eastern Europe. Poor girl probably expected her photo would only be used for something comparatively respectable, like a shady Russian mail-order brides website.

In the wirkd if data centers a major connectivity outage is often referred to as a ‘backhoe event’. Backhoes (tractors with hydraulic shovels attached) are the arch-enemy of fiber-optic cables as people digging with them all too often cut through one or more conduits containing bundles of hundreds of fiber-optic cables – thus cutting off the data/voice/video connections physically running over those cables.

It happens all the time – you’d be surprised. But data centers are designed to deal with backhoe events (fiber cuts) as the switches/routers inside very quickly re-routed network traffic over one or more of the data center’s redundant connections. It happens so fast that some to most users will not even notice the switching process.

Data centers can go 100% down as reported here, but the probability of an complete down of connectivity is infinitesimal…

But let’s be realistic: The highest probability by far is that the outage was a planned event to fix/replace something in the ACA system and the administration did not want to take responsibility for said outage.